How the social media has become a part of Google, as well as Bing, algorithm is something worth taking a look. In the past few months, it has been discussed and debated how Google is actually giving regular search results based on social signals. Experts suggest brand value on Twitter and Facebook may have some impact on the rankings on major search engines.

The importance of social media can be justified from Google Social Search, which offers results written and shared on social media. Also, Google has Realtime Search, which talks about content being shared on social networks in real time. Whether the social search tools actually impact the ordinary search results is tough to be decided as Google uses more than 200 signals for ranking pages, which includes PageRank, HTML title tag, and Anchor text. It is quite complicated to see if the social signals, such as URL tweeted on Twitter, can affect the rankings as some person is behind the tweet.

Experts suggest that PageRank quality may have a point to make here. Rather than automated authorized pages, it is more human dealt pages that may be ranked better. So, when a tweet for an URL is made from any Twitter page with a good or average PageRank, it is most likely that it will get better value from any other page with lower PageRank. Now, sometimes the PageRank on Twitter is overrated when you are logged in, so that can be again a trigger to think otherwise.

Powerful is the word:

People with a background of those who have some kind of social authority may impact a page in regular search more than others. As such, when an authorized page of a celeb tweets or shares something on his Twitter and Facebook page respectively, the rankings are better for those URLs. Twitter does use “nofollow” tag, which conveys to search engines that this is just another URL, not to be counted as a vote.

Google has to say that links that are tweeted by someone with authority is taken as a signal, but not always for ordinary web search, but more in the links section of Google Realtime Search. Experts say Google doesn’t have much to do with the data on pages of Facebook, but the links are treated just like URLs shared on Twitter. Social data is more for display purposes, as for now, rather than rankings.

However, with Google taking a strong account of what’s happening in the social world, it is quite interesting to watch if Twitter and Facebook will have more power in ordinary rankings. Till then, it is more about brand building in social networks for anyone, if one has to least say!